Internal Migration and the Spread of Long-Term Impacts of Historical Immigration in Brazil
Presented by:
Eduardo Cenci
Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Thursday, March 14, 2019
3:45 pm-5:00 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
Numerous studies have documented persistent economic impacts of historical events, often caused by immigration and perpetuated via the human capital channel. Human capital, however, is mobile. By documenting persistent impacts near the original sites of historical immigration, studies were unable to tell if persistence operates via factors that are fixed (e.g., head start in infrastructure) or mobile (e.g., intergenerational transmission). We investigate this question using a surname-based classification of ancestries to track descendants of historical settlers in Brazil living far from their injection points. We find a positive association between the concentration of non-Iberian surnames, our proxy for the presence of descendants, on wages in the municipalities studied. An increase of 10% in the concentration of non-Iberians corresponds to an increase of approximately 1% in wages (results from an instrumental variables strategy point in the same direction). We interpret the results as evidence of mobile human capital propagating the positive impacts generated by a historical event.